Seeing that everyone had fallen silent, the Old Leader took another sip of tea and continued.
"After we assigned samurai specifically to investigate, the same kinds of cases stopped happening. We all thought the killer had gone into hiding and didn't plan to strike again, but after less than a week, it started up once more.
"So I intensified the investigation. Before long, we uncovered quite a bit. First, all the victims were ruffians who bullied ordinary people in their daily lives. We began to wonder whether someone had murdered them in revenge for some offense.
"But questioning the people they'd tormented got us nowhere. Their victims were honest, helpless civilians who couldn't fight back. Even if they'd hired an assassin, they had no money to pay someone so elusive to strike so many times.
"When those civilians learned that the ruffians who'd bullied them were dead, they said the men had done so much evil that the ghosts and gods of the underworld had taken their lives. That was how the rumors about the Evil-Slaying Blade began."
The Old Leader paused and looked around at everyone.
"The samurai assigned to the investigation began letting their imaginations run wild, too. They started to think the killings might have been the work of ghosts and gods. After all, we'd run out of leads. But I didn't believe this could be the work of any ghosts or gods.
"If such beings really existed, wouldn't the world be in chaos? If ghosts and gods took the lives of everyone who did evil, then the world should have been at peace long ago, and the great nations wouldn't need to wage war anymore."
Hearing the Old Leader say that there were no ghosts or gods in this world, Hyuga Shinichi privately thought that it